1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to both the electronic module design and the related mounting mechanism of an electronic system, and more particularly, to an electronic system comprising a plurality of electronic modules, an enclosure case and an external case frame for building a computer server.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The desktop personal computers and servers have been used for many years. Modular design are commonly used in these computers such as add-on cards, 5.25" drives and 3.5" drives. Such mechanical module standards plus the standard electronic interfaces such as ISA, EISA, PCI, IDE, SCSI, etc., have provided an open modular platform where thousands of peripheral devices have been built for the personal computer market. These readily available hardware peripherals are one of the major contributing factors which make the personal computers so popular in the past decade.
But the sizes of most electronic components are shrank rapidly because of the fast progresses in electronic technologies. And small packaging design becomes more and more popular in many electronic system designs such as portable computers or instruments. The desktop module standards become less welcome in these new applications not only because of their bulky sizes, but also the module mounting problems. Mounting an add-on card or a drive inside a big system chassis such as a desktop or server is not a problem because of the available space inside, but mounting such modules inside a very small or compact system is very difficult. Some companies have produced low profile desktops or portables by using existing desktop modules. Although some of them got some commercial successes because of the compact system sizes and also the available peripheral products for such systems, most of the systems suffered from the complex system packaging design and also difficult system assembly or module installation problems. Such packaging problems greatly limit the use of the desktop modules in small electronic systems, although their prices, performances, and the variety of the hardware solutions are the best in the personal computer market.
On the other hand, lack of proper module design for small computers such as notebooks has troubled the computer industry for a long time. The newly established PCMCIA standard provides a portable module design to solve this problem. But PCMCIA cards are external portable modules and can not be used as internal modules to simplify the complex internal packaging design problems in most portable computers. The result of such packaging problems is clearly reflected in portable computers' prices. The end users have to pay substantial premiums for their portable computers and modules while obtain less performance and capacity than the desktop counterparts. Apparently, the computer industry needs a new module design which can provide a uniform modular platform for both desktop/server and portable computers. The new module design should allow all desktop/server and portable computers be built by using the same modules. The existing desktop modules and PCMCIA cards can not achieve this goal. New module design must be devised to achieve it.